Why Muslims Can’t Laugh at Themselves

Desert culture, Jewish humanism, and Islam’s hostility to comedy

In Exodus 33, Moses reminds God that if he, Moses, is to lead God’s chosen people, God had better present himself to inspire them. After all, says Moses, “What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?”

The Lord obliges, but the narrative undercuts the occasion with bathos: to see God’s face is to die (33:20), so God carefully arranges Moses in a cleft in the mountain rock so that God can pass by and allow Moses to view only his backside (33:23).

The satirical meaning of this story is clear: God is implicitly mocking Moses’s vain request to distinguish his people from all the other nations. The other religions present the full likeness of their gods in the form of statues, images, and other idols. But the Jews will be distinguished by their God’s rear end (because God is so high and mighty that he’s beyond our ken). No representation of God is permitted in Judaism, but we’re to imagine that Moses brought with him the radiant presence of God’s rear end to lead the people.

This is what we’re worth to God because of our smallness in relation to the transcendent Creator; this is the amount of God we can absorb. God mooned Moses!

Muslims’ Solemnity and Oversensitivity

Now skip over a millennium or so to the Quran, which explicitly prohibits mockery of Islam: ‘And if you ask them, they will surely say, “We were only conversing and playing.” Say, “Is it Allah and His verses and His Messenger that you were mocking?” Make no excuse; you have disbelieved after your belief’ (9:65–66).

The Quran also generally forbids the ridicule of people: “O believers! Do not let some men ridicule others, they may be better than them, nor let some women ridicule other women, they may be better than them. Do not defame one another, nor call each other by offensive nicknames. How evil it is to act rebelliously after having faith! And whoever does not repent, it is they who are the true wrongdoers” (49:11).

The influential, conservative 13th century Islamic jurist, Ibn Taymiyah, stated outright that, “Making fun of Allah, His Signs and His Messenger is kufr (disbelief) and the one who does that disbelieves thereby after he had believed.”

The hadith compiled by Abu Dawud said, “Woe to the one who tells lies to make people laugh, woe to him,” which technically rules out the imagination as a source of comedy. Dawud also has Muhammad say, “It is not permissible for a Muslim to frighten another Muslim,” which rules out any subversive comedy such as satire that might startle someone out of holding his or her comforting but flawed beliefs.

The hadith organized by the founder of the Hanbali legal school of Sunni Islam warns, “A man may say something to make his companions laugh, and he will fall into Hell as far as the Pleiades because of it” (Musnad Ahmad, 9220).

The hadith compiled by Ibn Majah says, “Do not laugh too much, for excessive laughter kills the heart” in a spiritual sense. And the hadith compiled by Imam Bukhari says, “If you knew that which I know, you would laugh little and weep much.”

In short, for all the emphasis Jews put on humour, Muslims went in the opposite direction, emphasizing the pitfalls of humour, the seriousness of life, and the severe limits that should be placed on comedy. That’s not to say there’s no humour in Islam or that Islam bans all forms of comedy under all circumstances. But Muslims take their religion much more seriously than Jews take theirs.

In an article called, “Conditions of Permissible Joking,” the popular Islamic website Islamqa adds to the above verses many others that lay further restrictions on slander, mockery, snide remarks, backbiting, and excessive joking.

Citing some of the above verses, the Muslim author of Having Fun the Halal Way says, “the worst type of joke, which is forbidden, is one about Allah, His messenger or anything related to Islam. Such jokes take a person out of the fold of Islam and are regarded as kufr.” Thus, he goes on to say, “certain practices that are rife among some Muslims, such as mocking the hijab (veil ordained by Allah for believing women), the beard or polygamy, among other things — amount to an extremely unacceptable sin and are considered equal to kufr. It is a sign of hypocrisy; a person claims verbally to be a Muslim, but inwardly hates Islam or certain aspects of it.”

Consequently, Pew finds that “laws restricting apostasy and blasphemy are most common in the Middle East and North Africa, where 18 of the region’s 20 countries (90%) criminalize blasphemy and 14 (70%) criminalize apostasy.”

Moreover, although Muslim countries haven’t punished blasphemy with the same severity throughout their history, the tradition of opposing blasphemy goes back to the foundation of Islam, because the Arab clans at Mecca treated Muhammad’s reforms as blasphemous. Subsequent blasphemers are thus equated with those who personally mocked and opposed the Prophet while he lived. And even when laws against blasphemy aren’t enforced, they may have a chilling effect on a humbler, more mature attitude towards piety.

As a result of this repressive culture in the Muslim world, we witnessed in 2006 the horrific but also unintentionally hilarious spectacle of thousands of Muslims rioting in the streets against the publishing of crude Danish cartoons that mocked Muhammad and Islam.

“The issue received prominent media attention in some Muslim-majority countries, leading to protests across the world in late January and early February 2006. Some escalated into violence, resulting in more than 250 reported deaths, attacks on Danish and other European diplomatic missions, attacks on churches and Christians, and a boycott of Denmark.” The French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was firebombed for printing the cartoons, and two masked armed gunmen killed twelve members of the newspaper’s staff, including the editor.

Incidents like those prompt Westerners to ask, “Why is the Arab world so easily offended?” — that being the title of a Washington Post opinion article from 2015. That author’s answer cites the relatively recent history of how the Muslim world has fallen behind the secular West: “There is an Arab pain and a volatility in the face of judgment by outsiders that stem from a deep and enduring sense of humiliation. A vast chasm separates the poor standing of Arabs in the world today from their history of greatness. In this context, their injured pride is easy to understand.”

But the problem isn’t just the economic and political contrast between those civilizations. The prior question is why Islam takes itself so seriously.

The Default Desert Culture

Part of the answer seems to be climatological since there are relevant differences between hot and cold cultures. Hot ones are relationship-oriented and group-identified (tribal), and they prefer indirect communication, whereas cold ones are task-oriented and individualistic, and they prefer direct communication.

In an article for Social and Personality Psychology, Evert Van de Vliert says, “inhabitants of lower-income countries in more demanding climates emphasize survival values at the expense of self-expression values, whereas the inhabitants of higher-income countries in more demanding climates emphasize self-expression values at the expense of survival values.”

Moreover, an article for Scientific American explains how “warm weather impairs our ability to make complex decisions — and even causes us to shy away from making these decisions in the first place.” This is because warm temperatures “are more likely to deplete our resources — as our bodies work to maintain homeostasis, we use up large amounts of glucose,” which our brains need to think. Cooling the body down requires more energy than heating it up. Thus, the article is called, “Winter wakes up your mind — and warm weather makes it harder to think straight.”

Personally, I can attest to the fact that going from a Canadian climate to Israel’s desert resulted in what felt like a scrambling of my brain. The heat of Israel’s desert is like a physical weight on your shoulders once you leave an air-conditioned shelter. You’re preoccupied with the thought of arriving at the next water station. The notion of carrying on a leisurely intellectual discussion in the desert aridity would have seemed to me ludicrous.

Indeed, deserts are the hottest places on land. But all the monotheistic religions were founded in the deserts of the Middle East, by tribal, survival-oriented peoples that evidently coped with their challenging environment by devising elaborate, once-and-for-all legal codes to avoid taxing their brains with continual thoughts of progress. Individuals wouldn’t have to work out what to do in complex situations since they could consult their Jewish scriptures or shariah for the answer.

Christianity spread quickly once it inherited the Roman Empire, including into cooler regions in Europe, so climate had less of a direct influence on that religion. The influence was indirect, though, because of Christianity’s ties to Judaism.

We can go further and surmise that monotheism arose in Egypt, Persia, Judea, and Arabia because the unbearable heat in those places enforces the value of simplicity. Monotheism simplifies polytheism. The Jewish and Islamic obsessions with purity, too, are desert-based because the desert physically purifies whatever it touches. The Egyptian pyramids seem so miraculous because the desert has a habit of cleansing anything that dares to trespass upon it. Little grows in the desert because water there is scarce, that being the definition of “desert.”

This is the point also of Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias.” The works of that once mighty king are annihilated and only the desert remains: “boundless and bare/ The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Of course, there’s a cold form of this purification by the earth’s extreme climates since the frigid polar regions are just as unforgiving and deadly as a desert. Astronauts in outer space, too, have this sense of that environment’s inhuman sacredness. One wrong move in any of these extreme places and you face your maker indeed, not just in imminent death but in the juxtaposition between the vanity of your pride and nature’s sublime indifference to your welfare.

Desert Culture and the Ironies of Jewish and Islamic Victimhood

There is, then, a default desert culture which likely influenced the founding of monotheism. This default culture would prioritize tribe, simplicity, and survival over individual liberty, indulgence, and frivolity. These cultures were preoccupied with following strict, all-encompassing laws, and with obeying an all-powerful, tyrannical God. That creator could do our thinking for us because the desert is no place to play God by trying to think for ourselves.

All that remains is to explain why Jews, therefore, have a much greater sense of humour about their religion than Muslims do about theirs. The answer is plain: although Judaism resembles Islam in certain respects, partly because of its foundation in the common desert climate, Jewish history is vastly different from Islam’s.

As I explain elsewhere, Jewish morality and humanism arose because of Jews’ nomadic, underdog, outsider status in world affairs. Jews were repeatedly conquered and persecuted, so they developed the idea of God’s compassion to balance out his ruthless justice. But that victimhood is also the source of Jewish comedy: Jews see the lighter side of life to cope with their history of suffering.

By contrast, Islam was founded as a religion of conquerors, not of the conquered. Muhammad himself was a conqueror, and Islamic pride is based on the greatness of their prophet who defended his reforms of pre-Islamic Arabian religion by military means. “During the seventh century, after subduing rebellions in the Arabian Peninsula, Arab Muslim armies began to swiftly conquer territory in the neighboring Byzantine and Sasanian empires and beyond. Within roughly two decades, they created a massive Arab Muslim empire spanning three continents.”

True, the Bible says Moses defeated the Egyptians and freed the Jews, but Moses never entered the promised land because of his disobedience or imperfect servitude to God. The Jewish scriptures were likely compiled towards the end of the Babylonian exile, when the Persians conquered Babylon and introduced the captive Jews to Zoroastrianism. This is just when the Jews were being freed by a foreign empire from their subservience to yet another empire.

Likewise, the Tanakh tells in hindsight of glorious conquests by the Jewish kingdoms under kings David and Joshua, but those stories aren’t at the heart of Jewish identity. Jews don’t boast that they’re God’s chosen people because thousands of years ago God showed his hand via some puppet Jewish regimes that slew some neighbouring populations. (Israel is currently a Jewish superpower in the region because of the politics of Zionism after WWII, not because of Jewish theology.)

Instead, Jews call themselves “chosen by God” because they’re longsuffering, because they maintained their Jewish way of life even as victims of history and of God’s “tests of their faith.” The result is the human side of Jewish scriptures, which is to say their protagonists’ series of redeemable flaws. God is loyal to the Jews even when they fail, because he’s merciful. That’s the central message of Judaism, not the proclamation that Jews are mighty because they conquer in God’s name. Indeed, that’s largely why modern Israel doesn’t physically conquer all the nearby hostile Muslim territories even though it could do so with ease.

On the contrary, the satirical upshot of Jewish monotheism entails that any such theocracy would have to be laughed off the stage. Thus, the Orthodox Jews in Israel who mean to drive out the Palestinians under a compliant politician like Benjamin Netanyahu disgrace the distinguishing feature of Judaism, which is its implicit secular humanism. The authentic Jewish response to the Muslim world is to play a martyr’s role of prospering despite the resentment of the enemies that surround Israel.

Alas, Muslims have an inferior comedic perspective on religion because they’re used to erring on the side of conservative simplicity and because they identify with the victories of their founder, not with their current lowly role in world affairs. The irony is thus perfect: Jews currently dominate in Israel but identify with underdogs because of the humanistic upshot of their scriptures and history, whereas Muslims are currently the victims and underdogs who presume to identify with Muhammad’s and Allah’s dominance.

If anyone today should find the humour in monotheistic pretensions, it should be Muslims because they live under corrupt theocracies. But the desert culture of simple, mindless obedience to tradition evidently wins out for them, and Muslims are oppressed not just by their oil-rich regimes but by the totalitarian purity of their scriptures’ message. That message is to submit to Allah like all life submits to the desert or else face God’s wrath, the heat death in “Hell,” otherwise known as the “lone and level sands.”